Another example of the necessity of using primary sources for non-fiction and history is from Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol, when Christmas Present warns Scrooge about the two children under his cloak: Ignorance and Want. So, in the pursuit of preventing either or both make use of eye witness sources. Note: Remember that electronic data bases are only as good as the person who entered the data and are not necessarily primary or eye witness sources.
With this in mind, let’s discuss the origins of the Republican Party. The main issues in the political battles between 1850 and the Civil War centered around slavery and the spread of slave territory. In 1855, when antislavery had risen to new heights, a state convention was held in Columbus, Ohio to bring together the opponents of slavery. Different political faiths gathered and accepted a platform which opposed any agreements with the South or Southern sympathizers. They called themselves Republicans. (This happened in the 1850’s, not in Jefferson’s era.) So, out of the Slavery issue was born a new political party; a party that after the war would become the strongest party in the nation. You can verify this by researching the split in the Federalist Party. The lesson: secure chronological accounts and report the facts from those accounts.
As you do so, remember to differentiate between propaganda and objective depictions of circumstance and conditions before you decide on the purpose or intent of your writing project. In writing histories you must define the politics and not fall prey to rhetoric - speech designed to persuade - which is also governments’ way of managing, directing, and influencing thought and action in the pursuit of managing a constituency.
October 8, 2002, Sam Perry wrote in consortium.com “The Politics of Preemption.” Note the definitions as he established them. And further note the use of Primary sources to establish veracity, all in the name of the fight against Ignorance:
“George W. Bush’s doctrine of “preemptive war” - the elimination of foreign governments he deems a threat to U.S. security interests - is quickly developing a domestic corollary. Any politician who questions Bush’s strategy an expect to be confronted by a rapid-deployment force of pro-Bush operatives who counteract act using weapons of ridicule and distortion.
In kind of a test run, this army swung on to the offensive immediately after former Vice-President Al Gore on Sept. 23 delivered a comprehensive critique of Bush’s radical from decades of American support for international law… conservative commentators treated Gore and others raising questions as dishonest, unpatriotic, and even unhinged.
Bush, himself, has joined in this politics of preemption with comments such as one at a campaign speech in New Jersey when he declared the Democratic-controlled Senate “is not interested in the security of the American people.” The goal appears to be the silencing of domestic debate about Bush’s unparallel assertion of executive authority to conduct an open-ended series of wars.
Gore, who won the popular vote in 2000, …was slapped around by Beltway political analysts. He was hit from all angles, variously portrayed as seeking cheap political gain and commiting political suicide.
Some epithets came directly from Bush partisans. Republican National Committee spokesperson Jim Dyke called Gore a “political hack.“ An administration source told The Washington Post that Gore was simply “irrelevant, ” a theme that would be repeated often in the days after Gore’s speech. [Washington Post, Sept.24,2002]
Other slurs were fired off by battalions of conservative opinion-makers from their strategic high ground on the editorial pages of major newspapers, on talk radio and on television chat shows.”
Combining information like this with the information Mark Lombardi outlined in Global Networks, when he followed the money, researching public records and other primary sources creating a web of interconnectivity that is astounding to this day. The lesson learned is that there is a difference between governmental official communication and objective reporting of the facts. Rhetoric may change the definition of words; in the war on ignorance, you must establish exactly what your words mean: preemption, suppression, primary to name a few.
